Yes please!

Heck yes that would be great!

From what I know the playstation didn't have any Z buffer, and relied heavily on sorting tris using the painter's algorithm. So I think that the game is using some object midpoint algorithm, and sorting on that. It'd be interesting to actually see what's going on.

IIRC the PS1, like a lot of 3D hardware of the era, lacked perspective-correct texturing and used much less computationally demanding affine texture mapping instead. The effect beingthat the textures appear to warp and wobble as your orientation towards the triangles they're mapped to changes. As I understand it, one common solution is to tessellate (break bigger triangles into smaller triangles) the geometry closest to the player, as smaller triangles meant less noticeable warping. I'd love to hear about what else clever developers came up with.

It's not just the z-buffer. The GPU fundamentally lacked perspective correction for textures on a hardware level. Obviously, there were ways around that (as ControlCardPin and Tanner Schultz pointed out), but it was easily visible in games that didn't take the time to fix it in software (the Twisted Metal series in a HUGE offender on that count... just try getting near any vertical surface in that game and watch the universe warp around you...). I'd say that it was the various ways developers came up with to combat the problem that game the PS1 much of it's very distinctive graphical look (such as shimmering walls, etc.). Although, it's worth pointing out that the competition at the time also had issues with textures (the 4kB limit in N64 giving it's blurriness, the quadrangles in Saturn leading to a similar problem as the PS1, for different reasons, and so on) with perhaps only the failed 3DO (ironically) being the only one without a major issue in that department. Those were some pioneering times. But, hey, they all beat flat-shading!

Somehow I knew you'd be in the comments on this one.

Was curious if you saw this video, such a sad fate for this game.

I hate when people get mass upvotes just because they are well known. Plenty of people surely say the same things and go ignored.

"just because they are well known" It's not just because he's well known, but also because he did a review of this exact game in which he described how amazing the game was on so many levels (such as detail) except the controls. It's very reliant to his channel as a reviewer who almost exclusively does platform games. Also Nitro Rad only has like 100k subs, which is a lot, but it's not like a super massive popularity or anything. Edit: As a note Nitro Rad's video on this game is probably the whole reason GameHut even released this video, there seems to be a clear connection between points talked about and release dates of the videos.

@@psychonauts0 How else would people know of that review if he wasn't well known? How else would people know him? I've seen his channel, his review(s)". Rascal isn't solely relevant to him. Getting upvotes isn't solely relevant to him. It's usually relevant to popularity.

The game's industry is just *full* of stupid shit like this where clueless execs ruin otherwise great games.

It's not even about understanding customers. It's about understanding function.

@@Aaron-sl9ov I wonder how functions would work like Dead or Alive...!

3rd person 3D games were a totally new thing back then and Tomb Raider obviously did something right. I totally understand their decision, even if it was the wrong one.

mario 64 came out in 96. the dual analog controller for ps1 came out in 97. rascal came out in 98. i think the publishers had enough time to figure out that tomb raider controls are not necessarily the best for a 3d action game.

The comments ask him to do a director's cut for every single game that he makes a video on. If we really want another director's cut we should pick just one and stick with it. He can't make them all.

Yeah, after commenting, I realized that he probably doesn't even have all of the resources to completely rebuild the game from the ground up. Sonic 3D Blast involved some tweaks, but Rascal is pretty messed up haha. This prototype is just so much more impressive graphically and control-wise than the final product.

@@ReplayStation I'd love to see more of his prototypes released somehow. If we could get "DX" versions of games that'd be killer. I mean, he's got a Patreon, right?

I assure you, Jon Burton does not need a Patreon.

I wonder if even just a quick hack to use directional controls in the final game would make it decent.

I think they did that as Wipeout XL seemed more like an expansion pack than a sequel.

Good thing they didn't publish the Anno series.

@@EdHarrisonMusic Lol didn't even think of that and a 40th game in a series is far more plausible than a 2097th.

Hello you ! Good to see you here .

Nice plug there mate

Sweet.

Nitro Rad? ;)

A fixed up version would be great, but unfortunately I think properly fixing the controls to directional input on the final game would be a lot harder than it initially seems, since the entire game/engine/levels were designed around it in the end. It'd be great, but it'd take more work than it's worth if he couldn't sell the updated version commercially (and he couldn't)

@@theSato very true. Just thought it would be neat if it happened :)

Yeah I think it's cool of him to own up to his share of the blame

Liam He is a venerable guy. I really respect him.

Larry Bundy Jr would have been a lot of work to “tune” everything to work with two very different systems. Plus, I just didn’t have the energy to argue... Sonic R was hard...

@@GameHut you developers don’t get the love you deserve

As explained in another comment, hot-patching a PSX game is an achievement of its own and the patch would probably not fit into memory anyway since camera system also needs to be redone.

+Jack White And, as explained in reply to that another comment, it's not too hard, and with a modchipped PS1 or emulator with NoCash BIOS(which is free and legal and works on real PS1 too), you can just push an edited disk image into it and done.

I never owned a PSone (well later I did get one for free with a dodgy laser I fixed) and still love those sounds. Although I loved Saturn, Dreamcast and Gamecube intros too. Its sad in some ways modern consoles are always-on so we never get this satisfaction any more. Well except the PS4 where I have the PSone theme. ;)

@@alexatkin Those nostalgia triggers still do exist, you just don't hold nostalgia for them because you're not young anymore. In 20 years you'll probably get the same sensations remembering stuff from now, that is if you allow yourself to form new memories and have new experiences.

Talk about taking the wrong lessons from the success of Tomb Raider. "Hey, let's make the game have tank controls, that's why Tomb Raider was successful right?" *Facepalm*

It was a success with Tomb Raider...but only because of the type of puzzle game that it was, each block on the ground was designed for that mechanic. Shame some publishers force their bad opinions. As a creative I have been faced with the clients asking for objectively bad decisions without any way of making them see the light, they are much too often the ones with absolutely zero knowlegde on the subjects to boot.

Me too, I have seen a few games solve it but an explanation would be interesting.

The most common way to do it is geometry subdivision because smaller polygons are way less likely to warp. Some other devs like Naughty Dog sort of prerendered the perspective each camera frame (I don't know how that works). This game probably checks the camera and the surrounding geometry to do some corrections in software?

The PSX didn't have native support for floating point geometry so all polygon calculations were done as integers. Much of the distortion was due to rounding errors when converting floats to integers. My guess is they used a larger scale so these rounding errors were less noticable; The difference between 1.52 being rounded to 2 or 15.2 being rounded to 15.

Kind of irrelevant, but this is the making of crash bandicoot 1 from the co-founder of naughty dog, Andy Gavin. He explains all the tricks behind the fantastic graphics of the game, i think it says something about polygon distortion as well. Very interesting! all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-bandicoot-part-1/

That is one of the problems, but that normally resulted in vertex popping or shimmering. The real distortion came from a lack of perspective correction in the PS1 graphics hardware. For a short explanation; the PS1, like most 3D hardware, renders triangles rather than more complex primitives because they're fast and stable. On each vertex of a triangle is a texture coordinate, which tells the hardware how to map a 2D texture onto the triangle. However, since we only have three points on a triangle, we can only make the texture warp parallel to two of the sides of the triangle. So when you have a surface that gets smaller towards the top (Like a trapezoid), it will be made with 2 triangles, neither of which have enough information to take all four vertices into account, so the texture will warp. Perspective correction fixes this by using the depth of the vertices to sort-of reconstruct the missing information, but it requires a divide calculation for every single pixel (Or every few pixels) and back in those days, division was super expensive. If you're curious about learning more about it, look up Perspective Correction on Wikipedia, it has a more thorough explanation. :)

Because when 3d was in it's Early days the Devs weren't a 100% sure which would be better... Which is why a GAME PUBBLISHER has even LESS ideas on what to do!

Human idiocy making something good bad in matter of seconds yet again.

Hear, hear! Director's cut!

I'd imagine its tricky with there being no legal way to download it that can be patched. We got lucky with Sonic due to Steams mod system.

Plus, is it even possible to hack a PSX game? I know you can use stuff like gameshark to mess around woth the game, but to actually hack it?

As someone who's hacked PSX games, yes. You do need special disc imaging tools though - PSX disc images use full 2352-byte sectors instead of the usual 2048-byte data sectors that you're limited to w/ .iso files. I've also done homebrew and successfully tested my stuff on a real modchipped PS1. Also, emulators help a lot here. Even Mednafen has its flaws (mostly pertaining to GPU timing being a bit too kind) but it does get things *mostly* right.

It is theoretically possible (and was done by PSX hackers) but is REALLY tricky and limited. Also prohibitively time consuming. Not even the original devs with full source code are expected to pull it off. In essence it requires one to burn a CD, somehow make the PlayStation execute code off that CD (either modchip or cheat device or exploit of yet another game). At this point you put target game disk in, loader code would then read target executable into memory and hot-patch it before executing. The loader would need to stay in RAM and hook itself to disk code reading subroutines to patch everything else on the fly since measly 2 (TWO) MB of RAM total meant code had to be dynamically loaded. This is not only arduously hard and time consuming, and obviously requires through knowledge of both game and console much beyond official specifications but also likely to require a major game code restructure which is not really an option even for commercial release most of the time. Furthermore, the amount of code that can be patched is very limited, otherwise it would be necessary to sacrifice some gameplay features or even game modes because of such tiny RAM - failing that, constant disk swapping would be necessary. Though it may be possible to store some code onto memory card, reading it back is really slow. Using an emulator that supports some kind of patching would lift a good amount of these problems, but PSX emulators need to use a (copyrighted) BIOS file downloaded from a real PSX (or its replacement) which makes officially endorsing emulation potentially questionable legally.

Mario 64 really was epoch-defining when it came to movement in a 3D space. I remember playing through _Portal Runner_ on the PS2, and its big control problem was the choice of "tank" (rotational) controls.

I hope the guy forcing rotational control was fired after the game flopped.

Could the publishers be worried about how many PlayStation owners had the Analogue Controller? Sony were the last to bring out an analogue pad, with Nintendo and Sega both beating them to it, and it wasn't standard until PS2. Even the PlayStation Classic/Mini is going to be a digital controller only by the looks of things... and back in the day - an Analogue controller meant directional controls, and a D-pad meant tank controls, =S. Croc had tank controls. Deep Fear for Saturn had tank controls with the D-pad or Directional controls with the Analogue stick of the 3D Pad, depending which you used. Typing on a Wii U right now, so sorry if this text doesn't flow too well...

In that case, why couldn't they use both? Tank mode for digital, 3D for Analog. When I started PSX, Dualshock Controller were a "must have". Almost everyone had them back in the 90s.

​@@Sypaka To me it was the opposite - nobody I knew had analogue lol I stuck with digital pad for 5 years and was very angry I couldn't play Ape Escape because of "analogue only" controls. Tank controls made sense for digital pad.

Assuming the controls where what killed it such a toggle could have been the difference between trash and a hidden gem. But as you say hindsight is 20/20

I know I'm two months out now, but...I'm pretty sure they didn't do that because everything would need to be reworked for both, which would eat up a lot of resources. Space and memory-wise. The game needs to be programmed for two different sets of controls and camera movements to make sure no clipping and such happened, like you saw in this video, because the clipping is what causes all the artifacts and weird stuff like items overlapping each other. Then the controls need to be programmed in, of course, and then you have the whole camera system... It'd take a lot of time, effort, energy, and resources. All four of which were probably in extremely limited supply when the decision was made to change it.

and yet it looks like something out of the NES era, like Treasure Master.

@@moosemaimer Hah, I think TT would have been better off designing their own character.

The character comes off as a severe case of "Greetings, fellow kids" from 1994 maybe?

I'll support indie devs when they actually make a game worth giving a damn about.

​@@LOOMING_WRAITH_OF_BAD_OMENSupport good developers that make good games and gatekeep THE MESSAGE out*

I believe I came across it from the royalty free audio section that youtube offers when editing videos on this site.

Uh.... No...

You can buy a copy for $3 and emulate it on your PC if that's your cup of tea.

Hey, I know you

game is designed around how a character can move. If character is made to move like a tank then the rooms are designed with that in mind. If you gave them directional controls as an option the game may of been infinitely easier to beat as it wouldnt be designed for that type of movement.

It sounds like in this case the ability to have the more fluid control scheme would be so widely appreciated due to the fact that those challenges implemented into the game certainly weren't made in mind with a more restrictive movement. So maybe the ability to switch would have been a good idea.

Shortest answer: Adding a "simple" toggle option means they have to do twice as much testing and debugging to ensure that both of them technically work. That's not even counting the ripple effect it has on level design and difficulty...

@@IdealIdeas100 Basically what he said in the video was that the camera loaded things based on what was visible (Probably because of the RAM) so if they fixed the camera for both modes they would have to do twice the work (Plus it could be impossible because of disk space/working memory, not really sure)

Noxedwin Tepes Some publishers are still like that. They can get away with poorly designed engines and bad optimization because of more expensive and powerful tech

Paul Westfall Really when you got guys in boardrooms discussing "market metrics" and "whats hot right now", you get no innovation, or bad innovation trying to copy a sucessful formula. It seems like many AAA pubs keep putting out the same game, same engine, just a reskin for your latest IP that your "focus study" told you people wanted. I think that if indie deving hadn't taken off the way it did, I wouldnt play games anymore.

I agreee its extremely sad to see how many projects, regardless of the medium, get ruined by someone who has literally no concept of the medium.

It's because the industry is mostly market-driven instead of design-driven, which is why you get higher ups in these companies more concerned with selling shit than making shit.

Yeah it probably would've been the console's Mario if it actually managed to pull this stuff off... the shooting controls were pretty unique for a platformer of its time, and when you look at the PS1's other platform game offerings like 40 Winks I still think this game was leagues ahead of it, even with all of its flaws.